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The year 2024 is drawing to a close – a year full of exciting projects, successful collaborations and unforgettable moments at the IT Centre. From innovative events and new partnerships to internal team celebrations and significant changes and new ones, the year was characterised by growth, collaboration and joint development. In our annual review, we take a look at the highlights, changes and successes that made our year so special.
Important Events and Collaborations
At the beginning of the year, we had the opportunity to present ourselves at two important events. On February 16, we were part of the SWT trade fair, where we were able to present our services and projects to those interested in IT at RWTH Aachen University. Shortly afterwards, the VI-HPS Porting & Tuning Workshop took place. Here we supported developers in optimising their applications for high-performance computers.
In March, we continued with the PPCES workshop from March 11 to 15, which focused on teaching the basics and advanced topics of parallel programming and HPC codes. This was followed by the Moodle.NRW community meeting on April 10. The meeting was aimed at all those involved in the use and development of the Moodle or ILIAS learning platforms at their university or other educational institutions.
May also brought the honour of taking part in the ISC24 conference. Under the motto “Reinventing HPC”, we presented the latest developments in our HPC department in Hamburg and contributed to the discussion of innovative approaches in an international context.
A few weeks later, on June 19 and 20, we hosted the ACI User Group Conference, the IT Center’s data center network solution. It provides network connectivity for more than 1,500 virtual machines of the IT Center and its customers.
The summer also brought international highlights: At the beginning of August, we were represented at the Customer Advisory Council (CAC) in Girona, Spain. The aim was to determine the current level of satisfaction of Dell’s customers and to use these findings to optimise products and services.
Autumn brought a significant milestone: On October 23, the CLAIX-2023 Supercomputer was officially put into operation. This important step in the further development of our HPC infrastructure makes it possible to support even more demanding research projects. You can also find more information on our YouTube channel.
Changes
The year 2024 brought numerous changes to RWTH Aachen University’s IT services. In the area of IT security, multi-factor authentication (MFA) was introduced for VPN access on February 1 to better protect the community from unauthorised access. February also saw further developments in our services. On February 6, Overleaf went live for teaching staff and researchers, and from February 16, IPv6 beta operation was supported for licence server software in order to increase the efficiency of IT usage.
The transition from RWTHmoodle to version 4.3 followed on May 23 with technical improvements and user-friendly instructions. Exam administration was also optimised with the Exam Scan plugin, which enables the digitisation of exam sheets. In addition, the telephone administration has been optimised, making it easier to process telephone enquiries.
Further adjustments included the shutdown of the Windows front end on June 30 in favour of a stronger focus on Unix systems and the development of the HPC landing page for improved accessibility. A particular highlight was the launch of RWTHgpt on July 16, an AI-supported service with high data protection standards.
In addition, the TreMoGe platform was further expanded to support students and employees with mobile devices. Email management was also optimised from November 28 in order to meet increasing requirements and improve the user experience.
These changes underline the IT Center’s goal of future-proofing RWTH Aachen University with innovative solutions and meeting the demands of the digital world.
Festivities
This year, we were once again able to celebrate our usual festivities, including the carnival party, the company excursion, the summer party, the traditional October party and the Christmas party. All of these events were a great success and helped to further strengthen the team.
Reasons to Celebrate
In 2024, the IT Center looked back on numerous successes that underline the commitment of its employees and trainees.
At the beginning of the year, Yasin Kalem, a trainee at the IT Center, received a special award for an outstanding internship abroad – an inspiring moment that reaffirmed the quality of training at the IT Center.
In February, we celebrated the launch of the “Rhine-Ruhr Centre for Scientific Data Competence” (DKZ.2R), an important step in the further development of our infrastructure. The aim is to support researchers and expand their expertise in data science, HPC, FDM and machine learning.
Another anniversary was celebrated on 5 March: Five years of RWTHmoodle! Since its launch, the platform has established itself as an indispensable tool for digital teaching and is celebrating a steady increase in users.
July 26 was dedicated to SysAdmin Day 2024, where we recognised the dedication and expertise of our employees who ensure that our IT systems run smoothly every day.
Our commitment to apprenticeships was also a reason to celebrate: on September 3, the MATSE programme welcomed 103 new apprentices and on September 9 celebrated the successful MATSE graduates who completed their training with flying colours.
Our HPC team celebrated two major successes in September: Semih Burak won the Rusty Lusk Award at EuroMPI/Australia 2024 for his paper. Jannis Klinkenberg won the Best Paper Award at IWOMP 2024 for his conference contribution. Both events are important for parallel programming paradigms such as MPI and OpenMP, which play a central role in the HPC world.
We also celebrated an important milestone in November 2024: the successful trademark registration of Coscine, an innovation that strengthens research data management and promotes international collaboration at RWTH Aachen University.
Thanks to these important events and successes, 2024 will remain an outstanding chapter in the history of the IT Center at RWTH Aachen University. We hope that the new year will be just as rich in fulfilling moments, successes and collective achievements.
Responsible for the content of this article are Hania Eid and Malak Mostafa.
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